"Big brother"
Translation:Kaka mkubwa
March 6, 2017
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This discussion is locked.
I had previously learned that kaka is only for a big brother as younger siblings fall under ndugu, wich is also for cousins. Likewise for dada. I'm generally a bit confused about how Swahili names some family relationships differently compared to English. Was this incorrect? Does someone have a family tree resource or something to clear things up?
It depends on the noun the adjective is qualifying. So here for example, "kaka" is an m/wa class noun and it's singular, so you need "mkubwa".
I hope that makes sense. The noun classes are just something you have to get used to as we don't have anything like that in English although it's similar to the grammatical gender that you find in many European languages.